HTC Sensation To Go On Sale In May, Before iPhone 5

HTC will release its first dual core smartphone, the Sensation, formerly known as the Pyramid, in the UK in May, a few weeks before the rumoured iPhone 5 launch date of June 2011.

The smartphone - which has hit our radar since the beginning of February 2011 - has been announced today and features the Qualcomm MSM8260, a system on chip clocked at 1.2GHz and which T-Mobile calls the Snapdragon 2.

The Sensation has 768MB RAM, a microSD card reader with, we suspect, around 4GB onboard storage (1.1GB free storage) and comes with a 4.3-inch display with Gorilla Glass, like the HTC Desire HD, that can display up to 540x960 pixels, the so called qHD resolution that Motorola Atrix 4G.

There's also an eight-megapixel camera which can shoot full HD videos with full surround sound at up to 30FPS plus a front facing VGA camera. HTC has also included a nifty video trimmer tool which allows users to crop their clips to the perfect size.

HTC hasn't yet published the details of the handset on its website but we know that it will run on Android 2.3 Gingerbread with a new version of the HTC Sense user interface which includes a "customizable lockscreen that will display social updates, photos, weather or stock news".